03 - The First Amendment (14 page)

“So why’d you unretire? Or did you ever retire in the first place?”

“There was some work to do,” O’Neill said vaguely.

“Work here?”

“Among other places. It’s not a perfect—world.”

Kinsey laughed. “Okay. You want questions, real questions? How’s this for
starters?

“Who’s the nutcase who grabbed me?

“Where’d he take me?

“What’s that ring thing?

“Where’d those people come from?

“What happened to them?

“That’s a good start, I think.”

O’Neill crossed one leg over the other and drummed his fingers lightly
against the desk. “Yeah, I’d call that a pretty good start.” After a moment to
organize his thoughts, he went on, “The man who took you hostage is Major David
Morley. Major Morley has served with distinction for several years, but has had
some—difficult—experiences. He was suffering a flashback. We failed to recognize
the full extent of the stress he was under, and we offer you our sincere
apologies.”

“You grabbed that grenade, didn’t you?” Kinsey said thoughtfully. “I guess I
should thank you. You saved my life.”

“Mine too,” O’Neill pointed out. “And I think somebody else actually grabbed
the weapon, I just knocked it out of his hand.”
Thank God for Carter,
he
told himself.

“Still.” Kinsey drew a deep breath. “Okay, I’ll accept that for the time
being. Now what about the rest of my questions?”

O’Neill sighed. “I’m afraid you’ve inadvertently stumbled on a highly
classified location, Mr. Kinsey—”

“Call me Frank,” the reporter invited, smiling.

Sure, we’ll just be buddies!
O’Neill thought. “Okay, Frank.”
At least
I won’t have to gag over that last name.
“And you can call me Jack.” He
smiled as if the two of them really were on the way to becoming friends.
“Nonetheless. I’m afraid I can’t reveal classified information.”

“Oh, come on,
jack.
I know what I saw. That ring thing spun around and
something came out of it, and then people came out of it. Troops. And there
wasn’t anyplace for them to come
from.
So what is it, a portal of some
kind? Where did those guys come from? What happened to them? They saw some
action somewhere.”

“You were under considerable stress,” O’Neill suggested gently. “You may have
misinterpreted what you thought you saw.”

“Bull puckey,” Kinsey snapped. “I know what I saw. I’ve seen troops coming
out of combat—I was in Chechnya and Iraq and Kosovo. If you’ve got a way to
transport men and materiel through some kind of ring thing, the people have a
right to know. This could revolutionize trade, transportation, war—” He stopped,
looking at the other man appraisingly. “You can even use it to go into space,
can’t you? We don’t have to worry about shuttles blowing up anymore. My God,
O’Neill, what
are
you people doing here? And how long have you been doing
it?”

There was a very long pause indeed as O’Neill studied Kinsey, looking hard
for whatever it was that Hammond had seen in him. “We’re fighting a war,” he
said at last. “And we can’t tell anyone, for the same reason that you can’t yell
‘fire’ in a crowded theater. What do you think would happen if you published an
article about what you saw here?

Where do you think you
could
publish it—
News of the World?
Either your credibility would be destroyed, or even worse—”

“People might believe me.” Kinsey studied him in return. “War? With aliens?”

“Yep.”

There was a small, deep silence. Not even Samuels made a sound.

“Shouldn’t you have notified every government in the world? What makes you
think you can do this all by yourself?”

O’Neill smiled. “What do you think would happen? Extrapolate, Frank. Let’s
say you personally notify the governments of China, Russia, Iraq, North Korea,
France, and Argentina that the U.S. has managed to contact hostile aliens? What
are they going to say?”

Kinsey thought about that, imagined the response. Outright disbelief. And if
they could convince the world that it was actually true, the accusations that
the U.S. had sold out the rest of the planet. The attempts to make advantageous
deals for single countries. The hysteria and panic. The skeptics versus the
converted. “Ouch,” he murmured.

O’Neill nodded. “You could say that.”

The reporter took a deep breath. “But how do I know any of this is true? How
do I know it isn’t just an elaborate cover for some new U.S. technology?”

“There’s a switch. Usually the aliens get all the credit. I don’t suppose
you’d be willing to take my word for it.”

“Um, no.” With the air of a man mustering a last argument, he went on, “If
Earth really does have a way to the stars, don’t its people have a right to
know? And if there are casualties, and a threat to Earth, don’t its people have
a right to know that, too?”

O’Neill nodded. “And do they have a need to know? What would they do with the information if they had it? What about that
crowded theater?”

Kinsey shook his head in disgust. “Do they have a
‘need to know’
that
they might die tomorrow? Come on! If the theater’s really on fire, they sure as
hell need to know! How else can they defend themselves?”

“That’s exactly what we’re trying to figure out. Until we do—given how the
rest of the world will probably react—
should
they know? Would their
knowing help or hinder? And would they actually even
want
to know?”

“I would,” Kinsey said instantly. “God, aliens? Space travel? Hell, yes, I’d
want to know!”

If we don’t give him something he’s never going to leave us alone. I know the
type…. Take him through, Jack.

Oh, well. At least they were going to be able to figure out what Dave Morley
wasn’t telling them.

“Okay,” he said. “How’d you like to go for a little ride?”

“A ride?” The reporter was momentarily confused.

“But you can’t
do
that!” Bert Samuels squeaked.

Most of the people who worked at the Cheyenne Mountain Complex were support
personnel. They had a regular schedule, eight to five, five days a week. The
rest, of course, were on rotating shifts, keeping the radar sweeps manned
twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, looking for Things falling from the
sky.

Still, there was a noticeable increase in traffic on NORAD Road heading
toward the base and Colorado Springs every Friday just after five o’clock.

George Hammond had made sure that Bert Samuels was right in the middle of
that traffic, with orders to keep his mouth shut under pain of court-martial and
remain at the base BOQ until further notice. He’d spent a good thirty minutes on
the phone with Mike Wickersham at the Pentagon, commiserating with him about
unruly subordinates who were rapidly accumulating black marks on their service
records but still managed to have friends in high places. The military was
supposed to be separate from politics. Fat chance.

Hammond himself had stayed late on this particular Friday, doing paperwork,
avoiding the traffic, and determinedly not second-guessing himself about this
whole harebrained idea. He trusted his instincts about people, and his instincts
told him that Frank Kinsey was a very different man than his father was. He would use reason. He
would do the right thing.

He’d better.

The team would go back to Etaa as soon as it had the logistics set up, which
meant as soon as Devorah Randolph finished the party for her kids and could come
back to work on the weekend. The inconsequential delay added some assurance that
whatever had gone wrong on that world would be long gone by the time they got
there.

Meanwhile, Frank Kinsey was sequestered in the cold depths of SGC, pestering
everyone he could with questions about the Gate. Mostly this meant medical
personnel, as he was taken there almost immediately and sequestered in an exam
room, away from the casualty ward.

He grilled Janet Frasier as she gave him a complete physical, making sure
there were no preexisting conditions that a litigious journalist could blame on
the military after going on a mission. Not knowing for sure what she could say
and what she couldn’t, Frasier said nothing, but kept her probes safely stored
in the refrigerator until called for.

“How many people do you get coming through here in a month?” Kinsey asked,
pulling a paper sheet up around his hips as he sat on the examining table.

Frasier gave him a pleasant, meaningless professional smile and rapped
perhaps a little harder than necessary at the tendon immediately below Kinsey’s
right knee.

“What kind of injuries to they have?”

“We get a lot of really nasty paper cuts,” she murmured, cracking a good one
at the left knee for good measure.

“Those men I saw earlier didn’t have paper cuts,” Kinsey insisted, leaning
forward as far as possible to try to peer out the door and into the ward across the hall. “Hey! What’s that
needle for?”

“Tetanus,” she said sweetly, and jabbed. “You know. For lockjaw.”

Meanwhile, the SG-1 team was caucusing, trying to figure out how much to say
and when. It was very odd to be trying to decide what to
say,
rather than
what
not
to say.

“He’ll need to know the historical background,” Daniel Jackson was saying.
“That might actually work in our favor—he’ll think we’re all a bunch of von
Danikens.”

“We
are
a bunch of von Danikens,” O’Neill pointed out.

Carter and Teal’C exchanged identical glances of bewilderment.

“Before your time,” the colonel informed Carter. “Before yours, too, Daniel.
How’d you know about him?”

Daniel grinned. “I did an undergraduate paper on the utter implausibility of
the idea that aliens had ever visited Earth and created the basis for Egyptian
culture, built the pyramids, or gave the Pharaohs their religion.”

The rest of them burst out laughing. Even Teal’C’s habitual frown lifted for
an instant.

“Hey, I got an A-plus on that paper,” Daniel said with mock indignation. “The
professor said it was the best one he’d ever seen. Wanted me to publish it.”

“Well, you can’t argue with science,” O’Neill said with mock gravity. “And
you were
almost
right. They stole from us instead of vice versa.”

“Anyway.” Carter got up and refilled her coffee cup, adding some powdered
almond cream flavoring and ignoring the disgusted looks she got from the others
as a result. If they really thought it was that terrible, she reasoned, why did the stuff appear next to O’Neill’s coffeepot
mere days after he’d found out she liked it? “What about the physics involved? I
mean, are we going to give him a complete briefing? That would take days.”

“Months,” Jackson agreed, scooting his chair aside to let her get back to her
own. “But I thought the whole idea was to convince him that he shouldn’t be
writing about this stuff at all. So why tell him anything? Send him away with an
axe hanging over his head.”

O’Neill sighed. “First, because Daddy is a senator who already knows too much
and doesn’t like us. Second, he’s got this fixation about the Constitution and
the First Amendment, which normally I’d sympathize with but at the moment is
really inconvenient, so we’re trading information for silence. And third, and
most important, because Hammond told us to. I think he’s nuts, but he’s a
general, so…” He sighed. “The question is not whether, but how much we tell
him. I figure we might as well go for broke. He can’t write about anything at
all, so we may as well answer all his questions.”

“And this is somehow going to
prevent
him from plastering it over
every front page in the world?” Jackson was still skeptical.

“Hammond thinks so.” O’Neill shrugged. “Right now, I’m more interested in
figuring out what went wrong on Etaa. I keep thinking there’s more that Morley
didn’t tell us.”

Dave Morley was currently under sedation and in restraints under Frasier’s
direct supervision. He wasn’t telling anyone anything.

Now it was Carter’s turn to shrug. “The Jaffa came, they saw, they conquered.
They’ve done it before. Just because we didn’t have any prior indication they’d
come, doesn’t make any difference—we learned that a long time ago. What else
could it be?”

“That’s the problem. We don’t
know
‘what else’. And I keep having this
creepy feeling that with all his talking about force fields, he wasn’t thinking
about Jaffa at all.”

“The Goa’uld have long had personal fields, and larger fields they use for
their ships,” Teal’C pointed out. “It is not unreasonable to suppose they have
developed a large, portable field capable of trapping the enemy as in a net.”

“That wouldn’t exactly be a force field, though,” Carter argued. “The
technology to fend objects off isn’t necessarily related to the technology of
trapping people so they can’t move.”

“I did not say it was. But having developed the one indicates that they could
be able to develop the other.”

“Okay, okay.” O’Neill raised his hand. “Enough. I’m willing to stipulate that
the field Dave described actually exists, which means we’d better be on the
lookout for it just in case the place isn’t completely deserted. If we’re lucky,
we’ll be able to locate some of Shostoka’an’s people and we can ask them what
the hell happened. In fact, that’s probably our best bet.”

“They’re not going to think much of us as allies if the Jaffa just got
through cleaning them out,” Carter muttered. “There many not be anybody left. It
wasn’t that large a population to begin with.”

O’Neill closed his eyes. Carter
always
argued.

But she also knew—usually—how to take a hint that her superior was getting
exasperated, so she shut up without finishing her thought.

“I don’t know about you,” O’Neill said, “but I’m going to go home, eat
dinner, and go to bed. Tomorrow’s likely to be a really, really long day.”